In 2017, Shanthi Murugan wrote an email to her boss. As the Head of Campaign & Strategy for Adore Beauty, Shanthi had an issue: she worked for Australia’s first and leading digital beauty space, yet she couldn’t purchase a foundation through the site. As a South Asian woman, her shade wasn’t catered for - and she was far from alone. So, she decided to do something about it.

She had no idea that her email to Adore Beauty founder Kate Morris would be the start of a movement. “Makeup should make you feel good, and it shouldn't make you feel excluded or invisible”, Shanthi says. And while it seems like a simple concept, the reality is that it’s not the case for everyone - and it certainly wasn’t for Shanthi. “By the age of nine, I'd been called the N word”, she recalls. And her first experiences of makeup and beauty were ones that reminded her that she was different.

“My mother is Sri Lankan and she's got beautiful brown skin”, Shanti says. “I recall going through her bathroom cabinet when I was younger, and I do remember that she had this one sole bottle of foundation that was just sitting on her shelf. It was very obviously not her shade. It was incredibly light, and someone had obviously sold it to her, and convinced her that it would suit her. And I remember reaching for it. I had incredible insecurity about my dark circles when I was younger because being South Asian, dark circles are actually part of our genetics. So I was always looking for something to make sure that it was less obvious, and I decided to apply her foundation underneath my eyes. I went to school with the most ashy, grey finish - it was far from matching my mother's skin tone and she's quite fair compared to my myself - but going into school and being teased because of it is something that I recall quite clearly. That was one of my earliest experiences with beauty.”

It wasn’t the last time makeup would leave Shanthi feeling excluded, or less worthy. “I attended a co-ed Catholic high school, and in year nine it was our first school formal. We didn't actually have enough boys in our year level who wanted to go to the school dance, so we invited the nearest boys college to accompany us, and it was the first dance rehearsal. And I remember all of the girls rushing to the bathroom to make themselves up because the new boys were coming. I remember standing towards the back of the group, and watching the girls fiddle around with foundation and mascara, and they had entire cosmetic bags filled with products, and I didn't own any makeup. All I had was a lip gloss from Red Earth. I remember thinking that no boy in my school could ever think I was attractive, because I didn't look like those other girls. They'd roll down their socks at lunchtime and sunbake on the school lawn. I never had to do that. They were girls who had Anglo names that were really easy to pronounce and mine was this constant, ‘how do I say it? How do I pronounce it?’ So I think my self-esteem was challenged at a very young age.”

Like many Millennial women, Shanthi grew up loving magazines. ”Like most Australian teenage girls”, she says, “I was fanatically collecting Dolly magazine back in the nineties, and religiously flicking through the pages every month as soon as it would land at the local Woolies. There's one issue that will always stand out to me, and for good reason. I'm sure you remember Dolly's model search. In 1998, a really striking Chilean-born 14 year old won the competition. Her name was Pia Loyola, and now she's obviously known as Pia Miller. She had beautiful caramel skin, and her eyes and her hair were chocolate brown, and I thought she was absolutely beautiful. I remember thinking it was the first time I'd seen someone of colour on the front of a teen magazine. Someone who wasn't fair skinned with blue eyes and blonde hair, and that image of that cover, it's as clear as day to me because somehow at that moment in time, I felt included. 

As I grew up, my older sister always had these striking pictures of this Black supermodel on her bedroom wall. And I remember sitting on her bed and asking, ‘who is she? Why do you have her on your wall?’ And my older sister said, ‘Oh, her name's Naomi Campbell’. She was so striking and she was the first Black model that I'd ever seen in my life. She had legs for days, and her skin was this beautiful rich, velvety, dark ebony. And her eyes were piercing and my sister thought she was absolutely beautiful, and naturally wanting to be just like my sister, I did too. It was the mid nineties and I was starting to learn about the concept of beauty, but these little moments of seeing women of color peppered throughout my teen years. They're still things that are so clear to me in my mind, because they’re memories of when I've gone, ‘I see me, I see me for the first time’.” 

So, was it inevitable that Shanthi would wind up working in beauty herself? “Honestly, no”, she tells us. “I actually began my professional career as an art director for an advertising agency. And I then went on to pursue graphic design. I was only part-time, I was a marketing assistant, and I'd gone back to university to study my masters. And strangely Kate and James, the owners of Adore, took a chance on a failed creative to oversee their marketing efforts. I was lucky in that sense. The company was incredibly small, I was one of five in the office and now we've got a company of over 200. But I quickly realised that I was learning more on the job than I was in the lecture theater, so I actually ended my studies at university and went full time at Adore. I never thought that I would work in beauty. I'd always had this love of fashion, not specifically beauty, but I'd always been inspired by beautiful things. And innately I'm a creative, so collecting magazines was something that really inspired me. So when I did find my foot through the door of a beauty company, I started to realise how much I loved it because it was like I was walking through a fashion magazine.” 

So, given how much she loved her job, it must have taken real courage to decide to write that email to Kate, highlighting the lack of shade diversity available to Adore customers. But, Shanthi says, “I was never worried about how it would be received. I'm naturally an introvert and I'm quite shy as a person. When I started working with Kate we had a very close relationship because we didn't have that many people in the company, so you can imagine that it was quite an intimate little family. And at that time, when I realised that there was this inequality, going to Kate didn't seem out of character. It didn't seem like it was a big thing. When I did decide to articulate what that inequality was like, the reason I wanted to write that email to her was beyond my own personal experience. It was about speaking up on behalf of others, because not everyone has the ability to sit in front of the CEO of Australia's first online beauty company. I saw that as a responsibility, to make sure that I was going to represent their voices. And so I sent that email, knowing that it meant more than just my story.

One of our company values is doing right thing. After I'd sent the email, we had a meeting immediately. I discussed my experience and went through how I thought we could be more inclusive, and Kate and James jumped on board straight away and said, ‘okay, how can we change this? How do we make this right?’ And I think that support from the get-go really helped where we are today, because had I not been given that support, my voice would have just been dismissed and I probably would've gone on to work elsewhere.”

And although Shanthi’s job title is Head of Campaign & Strategy, “I actually always say that (Global Shades) is not a campaign”, she explains, “but it's an initiative, or a movement, because it's calling for genuine and meaningful change. It's not at all a commercial campaign and it's more of a human rights campaign because we're talking about inequality. So the movement is about wanting to ensure that all Australians have the same experience and access to beauty, and that's about being inclusive. So we aim to elevate marginalised voices and show Australia and the world that we want and need global shades. Our approach began, and it was really important to me that it began in this way, by listening to those experiences and voices of people of colour, because it’s one thing to assume, and to create marketing collateral that you think is inclusive, but it's a more true and authentic angle if you actually say, ‘we're going to ask the people that this actually impacts, what does that mean to you and how can we be better?’ And so that was a really key part to us encouraging change. It was incredibly important to us to identify first the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. 

A very stark reality is that a lot of Australians don't actually know that this is an issue. And so I think it's harder to solve a problem if you don't know it exists. It's also very hard to solve a problem if you don't understand how it impacts others. So in sharing the voices of BIPOC Australians, we really wanted to reach as many Australians as possible to educate and paint a true picture of what their experiences were today.

When Black Lives Matter kind of exploded into our social feeds, many Australian brands were really quick to show support by using people of colour in their marketing campaigns. And in doing this they actually band-aided the issue. They jumped straight to a quick fix of representation, without actually understanding accountability for why it has been wrong for so long, raising awareness of the issue, educating and providing access to products, resources, and training that cater to people of colour. And so I actually truly believe that timing plays a really key aspect in how the public receives calls for change. This topic of racism has circulated for a long, long time now, but it's become more natural, I think, to respond rather than reject a notion of inequality. Now is the most opportune time to talk to those issues. And I truly believe that, but we know we're not perfect and we're trying to be better and deliver an inclusive experience. So I think the support from the Australian public and the beauty industry, to rebuild an accurate picture of Australian beauty, will result in real change.”

And that change starts at a macro level. One of the key issues that the Global Shades movement addresses is the way beauty companies allocate different shades to different markets, based on the perceived demand. “From a global lens”, Shanthi explains, “when you see how Australia is marketed, it's often these very stereotypical images of surfers and kangaroos and koalas, and you don't actually get to see the true diversity of our nation. And so we realised really early that the shades that were being made available to our country often excluded those deeper shades, because from a global lens, we were blue eyed and blonde and fair-skinned. And so the shades that were often sold to markets like the US and the UK, they just weren't made available to us, because people of colour weren't being identified as part of the population. And so that's one of the key issues that we're trying to address, is that we need to redefine, what does an Australian look like from a global lens? And once we can do that, and I think a lot of it has to do with our representation in media, we can unpack and remove these notions of stereotypes that have been embedded into our society for so long, and really uncover the true beauty of our nation.”

But skin colour isn’t the only thing Shanthi sees at the heart of this conversation. “I think it's important to know that diversity and inclusion is not just an effort to embrace distinctions in race, and that diversity, whether that be ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, age - they're all part of the inclusivity discussion. And so as a company we've been working with human resources, marketing and brand to ensure that we address diversity from the inside out. For example, we're driving initiatives to collect data to better understand our own makeup of our team. We're looking at our recruitment processes to see if we're addressing unconscious and conscious bias. Do I think that the global shades campaign would have happened if there were only white people working at Adore Beauty? To me, that's like asking a male only advertising agency when they'll run an ad campaign about menstruation. Where would they start, and how would they know what the experience is? I truly believe that initiatives like this have to be born out of experience, and understanding the personal struggle of waking up in a skin that removes you from certain narratives in society, purely because of racial prejudice. If you haven't lived it, where do you begin? And yes, I may have initiated the conversation through my own experience, but we're working on this as a team. And at the end of the day, we as a company believe in doing the right thing by our customers, and that means being inclusive.

As part of the Global Shades movement, Adore Beauty have interviewed and worked with an incredible array of people of colour, to start the conversation around how lack of diversity does harm. “There's one particular story that always stays in my mind”, Shanthi says when we ask her about the stories she’s heard via the movement. “We interviewed a Sudanese-Australian model - her name is Malaan, and she also featured on the Australian Amazing Race. When we sat down with Malaan, I knew her experience was going to be really piercing, but it literally left us all in tears. The one thing that stood out to me, which I had never known, was when she told us the story of her father's advice before she came to Australia. He had actually advised her never to let anyone cut her hair, and at the time she didn't really understand what that meant. When she established herself as a model in Australia, it took her like a good five years before she could actually book jobs in a country because there was no work for coloured models, but once she began working in Australia, she would arrive on set, and makeup and hair stylists were never equipped with the training, the knowledge, or products to get her ready for shoot. So if you can imagine coming to work every day and watching your fair skinned counterparts getting the works done, and then being told, ‘Oh, you don't need makeup, your skin is flawless’. The most jarring part to me was the response to Milan's hair. She's got beautiful tight Afro hair. And so often she was faced with a hairstylist that wasn't trained to work on her hair type, and it happened so frequently that they began requesting that she shaved her head to counteract their inability or skills. And the most heartbreaking part of this is that in Malaan's culture, a woman only shaves her head when she's in mourning. So this act of removing her locks held a cultural significance that was beyond aesthetics. And after Malaan shared that, I began noticing more and more that Black models in Australia have shaved heads. And all of a sudden I became hyper-aware of this and noticed that it's a common practice in this industry, and to understand the reason behind it. I just think that's unacceptable.”

So, with the Global Shades movement out in the wild, and the conversation well and truly ignited, how is Shanthi feeling? “I honestly feel like I haven't breathed properly in quite a while! But we haven't even scratched the surface. Inclusivity in the beauty industry extends beyond makeup. There's so much work to be done in the space of skincare and haircare for people of colour. So whilst this has begun a conversation, there are layers upon layers of progress to be made. And I'm sticking to this as a mission to make Australian beauty an inclusive space.

It's been the wildest ride of my career, and I'm so fortunate to have started when I did. We are a pure play, and we were leading in the digital space and I was learning everything that I knew about the industry and the digital market via these amazing people, Kate and James - they were teaching me everything that they knew. And I can say now that I go to conferences all the time, and I see brands on stage presenting and they always talk about trying to keep up with the advances in technology. And often I leave these conferences and realise how far we are in our space, and how much progress we've made. There's companies who've been around for a lot longer than we have, who were playing catch up. And so I'm incredibly grateful that I was at the very start of what was the beginning of this beauty empire, because I learned a lot very quickly.”

So what is it about Adore Beauty that places it strides ahead in the market? “I think that we approach retail in a very different way to many others”, Shanthi muses. “And I can say that genuinely, because I know that one of our key brand pillars is to talk about real beauty, and to normalise these once-taboo topics. It's about empowering women, but in a way that's genuine. And I think a lot of companies say that they do that, but they don't practice it in a real way. And so, hings like launching a sex category far in advance of any other retailer, having a podcast that discusses things like body hair and bowel etiquette when dating, these are all things that women talk about with their girlfriends all the time, but you'e never going to see that from a beauty retailer. And so I think why there was such great growth with Adore is that for once consumers were like, we're connecting with a brand on a different level, and it was something that they really welcomed and received in a positive way.”

So, knowing what she does now, what advice would Shanthi have for that young girl dabbling in her mother’s makeup? “I would tell her to stay strong, to embrace her differences, because even though it may feel painful right now, there is an entire universe of opportunity that will find you as you grow into your skin. And I'd also tell her to be patient and kind to herself, to know her worth, and understand the power of her voice. Because once she does, life will change in the most spectacular of ways.” 

And as for next steps? That’s easy. “So firstly is understanding and listening to these lived experiences of people of colour, to really get your heads around what the issue is, and understand it. And then the second is actually visiting and signing our petition, because through this petition, we can actually showcase and illustrate the demand that's required, needed, to have all globally available shades in Australia. And it's one of the sticking points of these global brands, is that exchange of commerce, of meeting demand in order to supply. If we can illustrate that Australia has the demand, then we will unlock the supply.”

Mission accepted. 

Go to www.globalshades.org